Cambridge's young ambassadors

I would never even have thought of applying to Cambridge if I hadn't gone on the shadowing scheme, says Simon Burdus, now business manager of the Cambridge University Students Union (Cusu) - and passionate about broadening access to the university. Oxford and Cambridge have recently come under fire for not admitting enough students from state schools. At Cambridge, the students themselves have decided to take action.

Cusu is the only student union in the country to have a full-time access officer and, each year, between 600 and 1,000 Cambridge students volunteer to help with access schemes. This number may even be about to rise with the piloting of two new Cusu projects aimed at encouraging applications from academically able sixth-formers from under-represented groups: the Comprehensive Campaign, a student roadshow that will travel the country by bus visiting state schools next year, and an email pairing scheme to allow prospective students to get in touch with an undergraduate from their own area.

In a small college auditorium, six student volunteers sit in front of a multicultural group of state school pupils. This is the first Cusu open day of the year and the informal panel - led by Cusu's access officer, Charlotte Richer - is answering questions about the applications process, the collegiate system, subject requirements, accommodation and night life.

The visitors are then split into groups by subject interest for a tour around the relevant university departments, and a college. As one group enters the main court of King's, flanked by the famous chapel, there is an audible intake of breath.

"Wow," says one young man. We move on to the college bar, with its slightly outdated modern furniture and students sitting over plates of lunch. "I could see myself in here," says the same lad with a grin.

As a pupil at a Sunderland sixth form college, Burdus had not even wanted to visit Cambridge: "All those posh people ... I wasn't keen. But my school said two of us could apply for the shadowing scheme, and my mum said: 'Just go and have a look.' " Burdus spent three days shadowing an undergraduate matched by subject. He lived in college, went to lectures and socialised, discovering for himself what life as a Cambridge student is really like. "It was awesome," he says. "I just fell in love with it. People say Cambridge is stuffy but it's not."

College admissions tutors also go out to schools to recruit new students. Andrew Bell, a young, jeans-wearing admissions tutor from Caius College, who spends about 40 days a year out talking to schools, says he has encountered "some quite aggressive responses from teachers and parents before I have opened my mouth". He is happy if this turns into: "Gosh, you're human." Bell says: "A stereotype overturned is even more powerful than a non-existent stereotype."

Teachers are also crucial to the success of access projects. Often students who don't come from traditional Oxbridge backgrounds put their presence at Cambridge down to encouragement from individual teachers. But such influence can cut both ways. Cusu has found that teachers with no first-hand experience of Oxbridge can be fixed in their prejudices and may put pupils off applying.

Such teachers are hard to reach. The teacher conferences run by Cambridge University's schools liaison officers tend to be attended by the same schools each year. Richer has produced a new pack for teachers and is looking into ways of targeting mailings and setting up school visits to talk specifically to staff. Unlike pupils, teachers remain at schools to influence potential applicants year after year.

As a whole, the university pumps more than £3m a year into widening participation. Rob Wallach, who runs science-based outreach projects, says the students are the most crucial part of its efforts: "They value the university and they want to share it. They are fantastic ambassadors."

The state school population of the university has risen from 50% to 56% in the past 10 years and, since 1990, the number of students from ethnic minorities has more than doubled to 14%. But access work is not about targets or statistics, says Richer. "It would be easy for the university to raise state school figures by concentrating all their access work on top performing grammar schools, but that would miss the point." Nor is it about competition between top universities, which is why Cusu is joining forces with the Oxford University Students Union (Ousu) for next year's Comprehensive Campaign. Access is not about dumbing down either. Nobody I've spoken to - student or staff - wants positive discrimination: all support a strict meritocracy that takes account of individual circumstances.

"Access is the one area of Cusu activity where there is no conflict between the union and the university," says Richer. "Our aims are identical".